Let's Shake Things Up A Bit!

Short and sweet

My first hurdle in writing emails in German is that you do not capitalize the first word of the sentence after the greeting. My second is that it is very, very common to abbreviate the closing. To choices I see regularly are MfG and LG. The first is short for Mit freundlichen Grüßen – “Sincerely yours” or “Yours truly.” The second is short for Liebe Grüße – which I have seen translated as “Love” but I think that that might only work for British speakers (I can recall the first time a male colleague from London closed his email with “love” – after checking with a native speaker I was able to relax). In the US, we tend not to end emails or letters to acquaintances or colleagues with “love” and might instead use something like “Kind Regards” or “Warm Regards” or even “Fond Regards.” All of these feel friendlier than “Yours sincerely” but nowhere near as intimate as “love” and I suspect that friendliness is what is intended by the people sending me LG. I believe that intimacy would require the addition of viele to liebe Grüße (perhaps at some point I’ll have a close enough relationship with a German speaker so that notes close with VlG?!)

One thing you will may have noticed is that abbreviations in German respect the fact that nouns are capitalized. Compare the way a German-English dictionary would indicate that a preposition is followed by a noun in the dative case in the two languages:

+Dat. gefolgt von Dativ
“+dat.” followed by dative

My favorite example of this is – you’ve guessed it, perhaps – “for example” – z.B. which is the abbreviation for zum Beispiel. For some reason we abbreviate the Latin exempli gratia to” e.g.” when we want to briefly say “for example in English.